Meet Mark

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Sisson. I’m 63 years young. I live and work in Malibu, California. In a past life I was a professional marathoner and triathlete. Now my life goal is to help 100 million people get healthy. I started this blog in 2006 to empower people to take full responsibility for their own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness...

Primal Starter: Meeting the Wild Within

Over the course of a day’s hike or in a sudden wonderstruck moment,many of us have felt the edges of our selves dissolve into the wild that surrounds us. We become unconsciously “of” our environments. Shedding the insular, constraining cages of our everyday hyperrationality—the mental chatter, the rigid expectations, and inevitable tension and failures that accompany them—identities and desires evaporate into the senses. For a time, we become raw awareness. The heightening of the senses alone can feel like a kind of animalistic thrill.

For our ancestors, the natural world was mystically animated in ways we moderns have a hard time grasping.Today we’re guided more by scientific interpretations of nature and the prevailing metaphysical and monotheistic religions that seat spiritual figures in theotherworldly.

For our hunter-gatherer and early “ancient” ancestors, however, the natural world was the seat and center of spiritual force. The earth was their cosmological stage for the game of life, whose essential figures encompassed many species and whose plot lines were always in the present, spontaneous making. Everything from animal encounters to a season’s weather were part of a mystical dance between people and the forces of creation. Spiritual life was life itself, and vice versa. In the words of the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, “Everything is full of gods.”

Of course, this enchantment came hand in hand with superstition and all of its limitations. Although today we have generations’ worth of scientific insight, we nonetheless still crave that sense of connection and, as Jung and others have called it, “original knowing.” We’re naturally inclined to seek “spiritual” or (in less metaphysical terms) transcendent experience in the wild. These encounters fill some essential hunger in our deeper psychic layers.

In this sense,spiritual experiences in nature aren’t so much about witnessing something of the natural world itself but rediscovering something in ourselves—perhaps the “wilderness within,” as author Paul Shepard calls it. Our encounters are rare moments of deep spiritual consonance, a comforting, vital harmony within our most fundamental natures. Humans, after all, have both the gift and the hardship of living between two worlds—that of the wild that nurtured them and that of the cultures they create. More and more, the two realms grow further apart in our modern age. These spiritual experiences in wilderness perhaps embody a homecoming of sorts and offer balm for the deep homesickness that accompanies our social and cultural progress.

Having lived in Colorado, California, and Montana and traveled extensively all over the country (but mostly the western US), I’m always blown away by the beauty and grandeur of nature. I can’t say it has inspired any “wildness within”, but I never fail to experience a deep sense of awe and appreciation for this gorgeous planet of ours. It’s breathtaking to look up and see trillions of stars on a clear night while camped out in the wild. They aren’t as visible in the city, probably because of all the lights.